Clarity
by Madhumalati
Summary: What do you do when someone dies for you? And what do you do with your saviour? Animeverse, post episode 23. Vaguely DouWata.


_**Clarity**_

A/N: part 1 of 2. Dialogues in italics are taken from a fansub of episode 23. (I can't seem to write funny xxxHOLiC. I wonder why.)

_What do you do when someone dies for you? _

He had to confess that he didn't know the answer.

He could still see her when he closed his eyes – the beaded shawl flaring, the sound she made when the arrow struck her, somewhere between a gasp and a moan, the infinite kindness and sadness in her eyes; kindness, sadness, love.

And maybe she hadn't been human. So her nature had dictated that she should try to kill him. So what? She'd been something to him that he'd lost so long ago that it was almost rediscovery, not reminiscence, to get it back. It was almost worth dying to feel that.

It was so very long since someone had held him. Had even looked at him with that depth of affection in their eyes.

Except for Yuuko, he doubted anyone living and human even knew his name.

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_Don't touch him._

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There hadn't been any affection in Doumeki's eyes that night. There had been purpose, deep and sure; determination, control, even a strange kind of tranquillity. It was a tranquillity he was familiar with; it was the tranquillity he had felt when he had left to meet her – the calm of a choice already made.

He'd never wavered, just as Watanuki had never wavered.

There had been death in his eyes. Anger in his voice, although it never touched any other part of him. Cold, cold contempt, too, when he'd addressed Watanuki.

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_You'd say anything as long as you could meet her again._

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And then nothing, Watanuki vanished from the sphere of his sight, his focus completely on the spirit before him.

Calm and collected, and swift and supple in his movements as he went through each of the seven stages that would culminate in a death.

A death, apparently, that he didn't regret.

For when he lowered his bow, he was still calm, still grim, still furious in a strangely detached way. And although Watanuki had often and loudly proclaimed his hatred of Doumeki, he had never meant it until this moment, when he could not even whisper it.

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_Why did you fire? Because she isn't human?_

_No. Because I chose to._

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Watanuki's life was simple. Yuuko's thoughts were complicated. And where the two collided, it was almost inevitable (and here, he had to laugh, as he always laughed a little after the red haze of fury that she provoked in him subsided) that Watanuki's carefully stripped-down life would suddenly gain colour, dimension, depth, ambiguity.

There were times he wished she would just shut the hell up, really.

Because every time she said something, it turned him inside out and changed everything he thought he knew and put everything in a dizzyingly new perspective that left him reeling like a child taking its first steps, once again unsure of the world.

Until she said it, it hadn't really occurred to him that Doumeki had saved his life.

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_He chose to shoot her even though it meant hurting you. So that you wouldn't leave this world._

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Doumeki saving his life had become something of a grudging routine between them: Watanuki was grudging about it, Doumeki acted like it was routine, and there was an uneasy acceptance that that was How Things Were, that he would get bitten and stabbed and attacked by things that, by all rights, he should never have come into contact with, and Watanuki would feel guilty until Doumeki provoked him into a screaming fit and things went back to normal.

Of course, this entire scenario depended on the little fact that most of the time, Watanuki _wanted _to be saved.

He'd made a choice, damn it. And Doumeki had calmly (still calmly, what would it take to surprise him or make him smile?) ground it into dust under his heel and not even apologised. Betrayed his wish, as Yuuko put it.

He hadn't thought this through. Clearly, he hadn't thought this through.

Because in all these months, it had never really occurred to him to wonder why Doumeki kept saving his life. And then Yuuko had dropped her logic-bomb on him and forced him to _think_ about things.

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_That's why you have to decide now. What do you do about Doumeki in the light of what has happened?_

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He hadn't really considered the possibility that, heaven forbid, Doumeki actually _cared _about what happened to him.

Impossible. Why would Doumeki care about him? What was he to him anyway, other than a lunch ticket?

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_Now you... you have someone who needs you. _

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He had to assume that she wasn't just talking about his inarizushi.

Doumeki…needing him?

Impossible.

But you don't generally stand ten hours in the rain, holding on to a white ribbon, for a lunch ticket. No amount of inarizushi is worth wrapping your hand around a switchblade to stop it from stabbing someone else. And though Watanuki would be the first to say his food was damn good if he said so himself, it wasn't worth nearly getting your arm chewed off for. Or involving yourself in a dangerous world full of spirits that run the whole gamut from cute to creepy. Or turning up randomly to escort your cook around on days when he looked particularly jumpy. Or following him around and making a pest of yourself until he has to notice you and not whatever depression he's sunk in. Or having your soul extracted by a spirit with a crush. Or sneaking into his room when he had a holiday to read manga together.

Lunch customers do not do that sort of thing.

Even friends (not that he would really know from personal experience) do not do that sort of thing. And maybe there was no affection in his eyes, and maybe he drove Watanuki crazy, but maybe his actions spoke louder than his words, and maybe Watanuki should have started looking more closely a long, long time ago, before it ever came this far.

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_Because there is someone who doesn't want to lose you._

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'Hey,' he said quietly.

Three more measured steps, and then he heard them slow and stop. He didn't look back.

'You can come to lunch too.'

Because…

_What do you do when someone kills for you?_

This, he thought he knew.


End file.
